Old Year Leaves

Photo by Klim Musalimov on Unsplash

The leaves which in the autumn of the year

Fall auburn-tinted, leaving reft and bare

Their parent trees, in many a sheltered lair

Where Winter waits and watches, cold, austere,

Will lie in drifts; and when the snowdrops cheer

The woodland shadows, still the leaves are there,

Though through the glades the balmy southern air

And birds and boughs proclaim that Spring is here.

So lost hopes severed by the stress of life

Lie all unburied yet before our eyes,

Though none but we regard their mute decay;

And ever amid this stir and moil and strife

Fresh aims and growing purposes arise

Above the faded hopes of yesterday.

~ H.T. Mackenzie Bell

From Old Year Leaves: A Volume of Collected Verse (1883)

Life's purpose

Source: Favim 

Stop wandering about! You aren't likely to read your own notebooks, or ancient histories, or the anthologies you've collected to enjoy in your old age. Get busy with life's purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue—if you care for yourself at all—and do it while you can. 

~ Marcus Aurelius

Life's purpose

Source: Favim 

Stop wandering about! You aren't likely to read your own notebooks, or ancient histories, or the anthologies you've collected to enjoy in your old age. Get busy with life's purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue—if you care for yourself at all—and do it while you can. 

~ Marcus Aurelius

Quote on writing

Source: www.nastol.com.ua/favim.com

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality.
Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

~ George Orwell

Quote on writing

Source: www.nastol.com.ua/favim.com

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality.
Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

~ George Orwell